This is a little hard to put into words. I have been thinking, for the past several years, why I am able to choose what I think. I thought about what would happen to the universe if I died, and time's role in consciousness. There are several points which I am absolutely certain of, and here they are. 1. Time is relative. A human's second is a schrew rat's hour, and a turtoise's millisecond. An alpha particle flying through space is not alive, so time passes instantaneously relative to it. 2. There are different types of consciousness. An atom has a consciousness, as does a molecule, cell, organ, organism, species, genus, family, order, etc. The larger the group is, the slower the thoughts occur. I am certain this is how the universe is in most cases, I just do not know how to put it into words. There is nothing supernatural about this, it is all simply part of natural laws.
Consciousness of an atom is rather uninteresting, since its structure is not one of thought. The structure of thought requires an enormous number of interactions taking place in a particular way... the sorts of patterns neuroscience investigates. Consciousness means nothing unless it's consciousness of something... can we really say there's an experience involved with being an atom, when they don't think? Maybe it's too human-centric to place that value on thinking, but since we're defining the terms relative to us we really don't think there is experience worth noting in an atom. Both time and space are ideas local to the brain/mind. Time arises from the way in which memory builds, while space is created as a way for the brain to form a type of perception that's evolutionarily useful. Problem is, we don't have any way of properly describing the dimensionless objective versions of things since to come in contact with them is to create a dimensional projection... and so we must settle for describing objects as space-time objects. The mind is what it's like to be the brain. The brain is what it's like for a mind to experience sensory perceptions projected into space time which have a relationship to an external item which has a particular pattern. In this way the patterns of the brain indicate the patterns of what's actual there, but the substance of what it's like to be the brain cannot appear in perception. (And this is why people become confused at the idea of the physical brain being the same as the conscious mind and wonder how it could for example have qualia -- simply because qualia of being something does not appear in the perception of it.)
Hoth I applaud your answer.. Consciousness of an Atom?.. hmmm, I don't think atoms possess consciousness. Consciousness is a human invention, as explained by Julian Jaynes "THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND" What is consciousness?. & how did humans developed consciousness? these answers are given in his book, I'm a book promoter now, lol. here is a link: http://julianjaynessociety.tripod.com/ have fun discovering consciousness!.
